MCN 2024

Artificial Intelligence has rapidly emerged as a transformative force in the museum community. As museum professionals, understanding the basics of AI and its implications to our industry is crucial. This presentation provides an overview of AI and delves into the various opportunities, challenges, and serious concerns that we must face together.

AI can offer the museum community tools from enhancing the visitor experience to improving how we do our business. AI-driven efforts can revolutionize how we do our work and foster innovation. However, AI in museums raises ethical concerns, especially regarding visitor data privacy and information biases. Equally important, over-reliance on AI might diminish the human touch, risking the loss of authentic, trusted connections museums aim to foster. There are real concerns about AI as it can distort, misrepresent, or oversimplify complex historical and cultural narratives. If not properly trained or contextualized, AI will perpetuate biases or misunderstandings. As museum professionals, it's our responsibility to approach AI with a balanced perspective, harnessing its potential while being mindful of its implications. Collaboration, continuous learning, and open dialogue will be key as we navigate this intersection of technology, innovation, and culture.

In August 2022, the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) at Newfields was awarded a Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to support the comprehensive redesign of their online collection, including a complete overhaul of the underlying infrastructure. The project, Open and Integrated: Redesigning Newfields’ Online Collections, will be completed in August 2024, resulting in the expansion of Newfields’ existing online art and historical collections into a single, integrated collections portal (https://collections.discovernewfields.org/). In addition to the delivery of art collection data and assets, the integrated collections portal will serve as an access point to the IMA’s full exhibition history, archival collection descriptions, item-level information, and digitized audio and visual materials from the Indianapolis Museum of Art historical and exhibition files, the Indianapolis Museum of Art archives, and Stout Reference Library artist files. The goals and deliverables of the collections portal redesign—led by a cross-departmental team—considered a variety of technical approaches, ethical considerations, and sustainable practices that have been central to this two-year project:

In this session, Anne Young, Director of Legal Affairs & Intellectual Property, will provide attendees with an introduction to Local Contexts (https://localcontexts.org/), whose Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels “offer Indigenous communities a tool to add cultural and historical context and cultural authority to cultural heritage content in their own local digital heritage archives as well as in digital archives, libraries, museums and other digital repositories globally.” Following this introduction, Anne will detail Newfields’ implementation of Local Contexts’ Notices and Labels within the museum’s CMS and how that cataloged information is presented to increase understanding and respectfully care for the IMA collection while grounding Indigenous rights.